When Steamboat Springs Water Resources Manager Julie Baxter learned in January that the total required funding of $7.9 million was available for a decade-long goal to restore the highly altered confluence of Walton Creek and the Yampa River, she was excited that the city could move forward.

Damage from old gravel pits in the 1960s and a hydrologically unsound reroute of the Yampa River in the 1970s caused multiple river ecosystem problems that city leaders are still trying to address.

“In the late ’70s they actually straightened the Yampa River, and they rerouted Walton Creek, the confluence area,” Baxter told a large audience Wednesday at the annual Yampa Basin Rendezvous hosted in Steamboat.

The Yampa River and Walton Creek Confluence Restoration Project has extensive river and wetland restoration goals for stream channel, floodplain and riparian improvements, Baxter said.

The city is taking the lead on the large restoration project on open space owned by the city since the 1990s, in part, to help with resiliency efforts and flood mitigation to protect downstream Steamboat where the Yampa River is channelized and hardened.

The restoration area also has multiple shallow, backwater ponds that have become a “pike factory” with too-ideal habitat for nonnative northern pike, Baxter said. The pike are aggressively predacious and significantly impact native and trout fish populations throughout the entire downstream Yampa River watershed to Dinosaur National Monument, Baxter said.

A Jan. 17 email from the Upper Colorado Basin office of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation noted the federal agency had completed an initial evaluation of proposals received under the Upper Basin Environmental Drought Mitigation funding, known as B2E, which was authorized under the Inflation Reduction Act.

“We are pleased to inform you that your proposal, Yampa River/Walton Creek Confluence Restoration Project, has been selected to move on to the next phase to negotiate terms and conditions of a funding agreement and completion of necessary reviews,” the email noted, regarding good news for a $5 million award to the city.

Three days later, a Jan. 20 Executive Order titled “Unleashing American Energy” from the new presidential administration terminated the Green New Deal and stated, “All agencies shall immediately pause the disbursement of funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.”

At that time, city leaders were uncertain if the executive action would impact the $5 million in confluence project funding, Baxter explained.

City staff emailed Bureau of Reclamation officials on April 8 about the status of the award and received the email response, “The Upper Colorado Basin Region is waiting until new leadership is established to allow them the opportunity to review proposals and make decisions concerning which proposals are consistent with the president’s Executive Orders and should be advanced.”

“The state has really stepped up to the table, but at this point we still have a $5 million gap, so we were really counting on … the big federal money that has been available the past few years,” Baxter told the audience.

“Having that really be scaled back right as we are ready for it, this will be a tough one,” Baxter said. “We will start looking again on how we can close that gap.”

Baxter said the city could consider completing the project in phases, but awarded state grants are dedicated toward the entire project being completed. Should the $5 million in federal funding eventually come through, the city is ready to move into contracting for the final design, permitting and construction, Baxter said.

With the expected $5 million in federal funds, the city project had reached the needed budget of $7.9 million that included $400,000 from city capital projects fund, $500,000 from the Colorado Water Conservation Board’s Species Conservation Trust Fund and $2 million from the conservation board’s Projects Bill Grants.

Where Walton Creek meets the Yampa River, gravel mining operations that began in 1968 left behind an ecosystem tangle of nonnatural backwater ponds, gravel deposits, artificially raised banks, side channels and slow-moving water that provides perfect spring spawning areas for destructive nonnative northern pike, explained Billy Atkinson, longtime CPW aquatic biologist in Steamboat.

“This has been a goal for many years to address all these issues at Walton Creek confluence,” Atkinson said. “The way the river has been altered through this reach, it’s no longer functioning properly.”

The project has 10 objectives:

• Reduce northern pike spawning habitat
• Improve proper river function
• Preserve and restore flood plain connectivity and enhance flood protection
• Improve stream temperature
• Enhance biodiversity
• Increase wetland habitat
• Preserve and improve recreational access to the river
• Protect infrastructure from future channel migration
• Facilitate and protect water diversion for snowmaking
• Minimize anticipated ongoing costs of channel maintenance

The project plan, now on hold, would fill historical gravel mining areas, realign the connection point of Walton Creek and the Yampa River, reduce berms and create overflow channels, shape meander bends, install large wood structures to slow down water and prevent erosion, revegetate banks and restore riparian and wetland areas in Williams Preserve.

The project has “very practical value for the city of Steamboat Springs in improving our resiliency to flooding and drought and improved water quality and water temperature,” Baxter said.

The historical confluence of Walton Creek and the Yampa River was located close to where the Yampa River Core Trail is now, but the current altered confluence point is near the far edge of parking at River Creek Park. The proposed new confluence during restoration would be realigned as close as feasible to the historical confluence, considering current land use, Baxter explained.

The river confluence needs to be moved downstream because where the two rivers come together currently, smaller Walton Creek is at a lower elevation than the larger Yampa River, which is causing, even at low flows, the water to push back and create the backwater swallow areas, she noted.